A Setting Sun – December / Sun Hammer – A Dream in Blood
Jay Bodley seems to be a busy guy. With "A Setting Sun – December"" and "Sun Hammer – A Dream in Blood", he released two albums within just a couple of months. While both linger somewhere between drone and ambient, the individual albums approach the genre slightly different.
December starts of intesne and brutal. After some distant flickers and hints of feedback, "Livonia" the first track of "December" floors you with a wall of distortion and high frequency buzzing drones . The following part with its muffled shifting waves and picturesque synth dribbles sound like a soothing lullaby to a lucid afternoon snooze in contrast to the heavy weight beginning. Compared to the first one, the other five tracks of "December" are a little more hushed. Sometimes they venture off into more dense distorted territories, sometimes they drone and pulsate along peacefully – "December" might not be adding anything particularly new to the modern ambient genre, but it doesn't need to. Moving gently, the tracks are low-key enough to be running in the background (in the best meaning of the idea of ambient music) and they have enough detail to keep you focused on the sounds. This is great material to doze off to with its textures drifting in and out of focus – hovering in half a sleep, daydreaming states.
"A Dream in Blood" is a lot more pastoral and melancholic in tone. The distortion is pushed into the background, while woolly drones spread out as large, opaque landscapes. Bodley does a great job of transforming one state of sound to another; the tracks never finished, where they started. The sounds are always in a state of permanent flux. High airy drones slowly morph into warming bass rumbling textures that drown in cavernous reverbs. While this may not be a totally new concept, Bodley does a pretty good job at transforming the different plateaux of sound.
The only exception from this dark, introspective approach is "Concerning the Change of Address of S. Akalin" with its flickering, sizzling noises that seem to stutter nearly randomly through the stereo-field before they sink into the moist bed of large reverbs. Here Bodley returns to the aesthetic of his A Setting Sun material and ventures into more dozing teeritories.
Bodley – as A Setting Sun as well as under his Sun Hammer disguise crafts some serious ambient/drone pieces. While A Dream in Blood seems to weight a little more in terms of emotional heaviness and underlying melancholy, December is no less a great sounding piece, that just moves along a little quieter, mellower.
Moodgadget Futuresequence